Monday

My sister has been sending me old family photos--really the only thing I wanted, and something that with technology today is pretty easy to share with everyone. My ultimate goal is to get everything scanned so that the rest of the family can get the pictures they want, but it's going to take a long time, I think. I've barely scratched the surface with about 75 pictures done.

Part of the process that I should have expected but didn't--most of the pictures are very, very old and are faded to being barely able to see. Some I won't be able to do anything with, but a lot of them...

My mom. With a bear in Germany. No, I don't know why.

I can at least tone down the yellowing age has inflicted them with and try to enhance other colors. The old black and white photos--some 60 years old--only need brightening.

My dad on the left; he was probably around 22 years old.

And some scratch removal.

Have to admit, it's been a lot of fun going through these pictures. Some I remember, most I do not, and some are kind of eye opening. I'd forgotten just how social my parents were when I was little--there are a lot of pictures from parties, of people I have absolutely no memory of. Judging by the drinking...I'm pretty sure my parents had no memory of them, either.

Heh.

And now we know for sure where I get it all from.

Yep. That's my mom on the left. On a tricycle. In a helmet. With a giant peace medallion around her neck on a thick chain.

Sunday

This is longer than I intended, might be better suited for when you have insomnia...Conversation with an UndrCvr Murfazoid, sometime in the last couple of weeks...

Not introverted. If anything you’re more of an ambivert: traits of both, and where you fall on the spectrum at any given time depends on the day, the sunlight, if you’re facing north or south, and how many zombies are chasing you.But seriously, think about it. In junior high and in 9th grade? You were fearless. Even while you picked on me you defended me to everyone else and you stood up to jocks who towered over you. You never hesitated to be the first to give oral reports in class; you pushed unabashed editorial pieces through in journalism, even when you knew they were written with the absurd in mind (remember Cheezus from Planet Cheeto?); you didn’t blink at standing up in front of the music class with your guitar while you sang. You stood up to the she-devil teacher of junior high and you wanted the hardest history teacher in 8th grade—and then proceeded to challenge him in front of everyone. You were by no definition shy back then; it wasn’t until I knew you as an adult that I saw some of those traits, and honestly, I am curious what the triggers might have been, if there even were any.

Shyness, social anxiety, introversion; anxiety in general.

I don’t even know how we got on the topic, but the discussion went on a long time and left me awake most of the rest of the night as I tried to reach back into the very dusty corners of my brain and pick through cobweb-coated memories.

I wanted to say I’d had some level of social anxiety my entire life; going places the first time alone has always been hard. Meeting new people has always been terrifying. The idea of carrying on a conversation has been puzzling for…forever.

Yet, when I look back with a modicum of honesty…no. As a kid I jumped into life with reckless abandon. There was so much to do and not enough time to do it all before curfew called me inside. As a teenager, I was perhaps less reckless, but I didn’t cower from things.

Jump on the bus and head downtown alone? Not a problem.

Run to McD’s to meet up with a friend who was bringing along someone new? That was fun.

Jump into a school project with kids I didn’t know? Fine.

The aunt and uncle I don’t remember at all are coming for a visit? Sweet!

Those things today might just about paralyze me. I was a fairly extroverted kid who somewhere along the way became not only introverted to a degree, but also fearful. Meeting new people, the idea of having to carry on a conversation with them is actually painful. I can do it if I’m with someone I know and trust, but by myself?

Agony.

I tend toward the quiet; what the hell can I talk about? How will the empty spaces be filled? I don’t like awkward, and abrupt conversation is awkward. What if I don’t have anything to contribute? Everything will be wrong and it will be my fault. I’m a writer; I like being able to go back and edit; I need to be able to go back and edit. You just can’t do that when you’re speaking with someone.

I am going to say something stupid.

Getting involved in something with people I only know online, no matter how much I like them?

Terrifying.

You’ll do things the truly introverted will not; once you decided to join the 3 Day walk, it was something you truly looked forward to. You walk around with neon pink hair; you SHAVED YOUR HEAD in front of hundreds of people and were less concerned over the purple hair as one might have hoped (sorry.) Yet when you flip the coin over and examine the other side: you went to a conference in a very playful place, but you couldn’t have gone without Mike because of new people. You engage in business strictly by email and texting, and if you examine it closely, it’s because the very idea of having to do it in person scares the hell out of you.

This is marginally the truth.

That first 3 Day…The Spouse Thingy went with me to the hotel; he stayed with me as I met people I knew online. I didn’t jump into that alone. I’m as surprised as anyone else that I agreed to do it in the first place because—aside from my other issues—I knew it meant meeting several people.

It doesn’t even matter that I knew I would like them and they wouldn’t hate me. I still would have gone—I know that, not just think that—but it would have been roughly 500 times more difficult if the Spouse Thingy had not tagged along.

Have I met you? Than chances are I’ll be able to head off to hang with you all by myself. But you’ll also have to be someone I’m sure won’t take it personally if I stammer, stutter, or just don’t have a lot to say.

I’m not anti-social. I’m just awkwardly social.

Stereotype is to blame the mother; it’s always the mother’s fault.

The stereotype is bullshit.

This is not my mother’s doing; hell, the example I had growing up was of social interaction. My mom was a social butterfly; she had friends everywhere, she was active and involved, and her endeavors were wonderfully creative. By the time she stopped being social I was no longer living with them; I was married and the Air Force was bouncing us around.

And that may be the trigger right there. All that moving; the older you get, it seems like you forget to understand how one makes friends, and it’s more difficult to meet anyone as it is.

But I don’t really know. That might be it; that might be way off the mark.

Here’s the odd thing: people can come up to me while I sit in Starbucks and start a conversation; I’m fine with that. I don’t panic. I don’t think anything other than whatever they want to discuss.

However…I will never be the one initiating that conversation.

You pick on a kid in public and start shouting or hitting, I probably will say something/threaten something/get in over my head. I don’t stop to worry about what you think, feel, that you might not want me to bother you at that moment…I just react. If you pick on me I won’t hesitate (most of the time) to tell you to shove it, how hard, and how far.

I’m not anxious when I perhaps need to be.

But damn…even before my hearing got the better of me, I didn’t like the phone. Calling someone? It might take an hour to work up the nerve…and not just to strangers. To anyone. While it was inconsistent, I had a few times where I had to talk myself into calling my own mother. Why? Who the hell knows? I only know it was a lot of work to dial the damn thing.

To be fair, I do know the trigger for that…it doesn’t change anything, but I know where it stems from and it’s a fairly innocent thing, going back to when I was just a kid and we lived in Germany. There was no flat rate phone service; my parents had to pay for every call we made, so permission had to be granted before I could use the phone, and 99% of the time the answer was no. I was 6,7,8 years old; why the hell did I need to call anyone when my friends were in the same damned building? (That’s my “damned” not something I heard from either parent.) Go knock on their doors and see if they can come out and play.

Over the years that just warped from only being allowed necessary calls to being afraid to make them at all.

By the time I wanted to pick up the phone and call, I couldn’t hear on it. Karma or Kismet or whatever…it’s a bitch. It breeds its own concerns: what the hell will I do if a call needs to be made—an emergency—and there’s no one else here to do it? How many people think it’s and excuse and not a reason, and they take it personally?

There’s nothing wrong with being a quiet person; there is, perhaps, something wrong with not being able to participate in the normal back and forth of simple small talk, not asking of someone else what they have asked of you. But I understand this and take the blame; you’ve been conditioned to not ask questions because over the years I wouldn’t and couldn’t answer them. Not asking becomes habit. That’s still less than being introverted; you want to engage, you simply had a barrier placed in front of you and haven’t set it on fire and burned it down.

Fine, I’ll blame him for it.

Seriously, though, I do grasp that I fail in normal back and forth conversation sometimes. Those moments when you’re just getting to know someone and they ask you what you do for a living, how many kids you have, dogs or cats, where’d you go to school…I answer those questions but often don’t follow it up with a question in kind.

That’s either because I really have been conditioned to not ask, or I’m just a bit backwards. Or both. I accept that it might be both.

The curious element for me is the anxiety experienced when confronted with the known; you can hang out with someone you met while having your security blanket with you, yet you backpedal furiously if you have to meet them again knowing they will have someone new with them. The idea of meeting someone new seems to be like flying is for you: you can do it if you have no other choice, but you’d rather not and it might be best if you’re drunk. And the truly puzzling piece is that particular anxiety extends to family.

That’s only partially true. I wouldn’t feel anxious over the idea of meeting up with my sisters at all. Extended family, aunts and uncles, sure. I don’t know them, really. I don’t remember them other than their names and with only a couple exceptions haven’t seen them since I was a very young kid. I got reamed out on the phone by one when I had to cancel plans to go over to their house for dinner; they’d moved into the same area I lived in, but the Boy was a baby and had gotten sick. I don’t think she believed me, because the lasagna she made was apparently more important than why we had to cancel at the last minute.

I couldn’t change that. A baby with a 104o temp trumps someone else’s hurt feelings. But really, that’s neither here nor there and doesn’t have much to do with any of my quirks.

Still…these days I can only take in so much at once; if we’re going off to do something fun and I don’t invite you, it’s not because I don’t want you there, it’s because I know I’ll already be at my limit.

Or maybe it’s because we have a need to be alone.

It wasn’t too long ago we went somewhere and there were a lot of hurt feelings because we didn’t ask people to come hang with us. Seriously hurt feelings. But the truth was that—aside from the point that we did want to be alone, we were celebrating something personal (and we should have come right out with that but we didn’t)—in that one geographical area there were no fewer than 16 people who wanted to see us. We had 3 days, 16 people; some were friends who understood. Some were family, and I did hear but we’re family.

Yeah, well, they weren’t the only family in the area. If we’d visited everyone…well, it wouldn’t have been the private celebration we were shooting for.

And really…at some point, things like that stop being a vacation and become a trip to visit family.

People were going to be hurt no matter what. So we specifically went alone, and made it pretty clear that we weren’t looking anyone up while we were in the area.

And it really is more than wanting privacy. All those people…I would have been overwhelmed.

And that, to be honest, has nothing to do with all my weird little quirks and everything to do with the brain tumor of 2002 and the issues it left me with. That’s half the reason flying is a bad idea for me, and a lot of the reason I don’t cope well in certain situations. Cortisol goes up, blood sugar goes down, and bad things happen. If they don’t happen emergently, they just feel horrible.

I don’t do things to intentionally feel horrible.

And I’ve gone way off track.

You are who you are, and who you are is fundamentally a good person, ambiversion and all. It may do no good at all to pick apart the issues you know you have and the issues others see in you. Just accept that for the same reasons you overlook your friends’ issues, others overlook yours. And the friends who have caused you issues…are very sorry.

Monday

He's been waking me between 4:15 and 4:45 most mornings for quite a while. I could not figure out why; he's not hungry and if he was there's dry food out. He doesn't want attention, really, because I've tried petting him to get him to shut up. He just seems to want to wake me up when he knows I don't want to be awake.

But for whatever reason this morning, I was semi-awake at 4:45 and heard a noise a lot like a car door slamming. And within 5 seconds, he was there by my head, meowing at me. I rolled over just as he jumped down and ran off, so I followed him.

He headed straight for the front door, and looked out the narrow door-length window there...like he does at 7:15 when the Spouse Thingy usually gets home from work.

And it clicked: one of the neighbors is either leaving for work at o'dark-thirty or they're coming home, and he thinks it's the Spouse Thingy. He wakes me up because YAY! He's home!

I can only imagine his daily crushing disappointment when that door doesn't open. I don't know how long he waits there, but I'm guessing it's 20 minutes or so, based upon how long it took him to stand in the doorway to register his daily complaint.

He was back at 6:45 as usual, curling up next to me while he meowed every minute; I've always taken this as "get up...get up...get up...get up..." but now I wonder if it's really "where is he? where is he?"

So I think I get it now. I'm still not happy about it, because...sleep...but I get it.

Thursday

Toodleoo, Fred...I truly hope God will have for you the forgiveness that the rest of us can't muster, and will show you depths of compassion and mercy that you didn't seem to have for others.

I don't believe in the literal definition of Hell, but I suspect when you get where you're going, you're going to see the tears in his eyes and feel the pain you've caused him, and your soul will absolutely clench.

Wednesday

My conundrum: ride my bicycle while wearing a bike helmet and overheat, or ride without and accept the risk of what might happen if I wreck.

If the bike were just a bike, I'd chuck the helmet, but it has a battery and pedal-assist, so theoretically I could pedal fast and hard, run the motor, and get the bike up to 15-20 mph (so far, I haven't done that, because I can only pedal steady and a tad better than slowish.)

If I wear the helmet, there's a 99.9% chance that I will overheat. This has resulted in me passing out, though not while on the bike. I did manage to get inside the house and my butt to the floor before the lights went out.

I did buy the most vented and well made helmet I could find. Still, overheating.

Sunday

Facebook and Twitter and every other social space on the Internet is painting a picture of a world without much sympathy for the idea that Fred Phelps might not be with us much longer.

Maybe.

I won't rejoice when he's dead. I think what he's done with his life is nothing more than painting in lowlights and monochromatic flatness, bereft of contribution other than to his own bank accounts; that doesn't give me license to tapdance on the man's grave.

And that church is still out there. He was supposedly excommunicated by his own church, and I really want to know why, but whether he's with them or not it exists through his own efforts.

But no, when he dies, I will not cheer. I won't be happy about it. I'll shrug it off. But it's not something that will make me happy. A life lost is opportunity lost; he'll never have the chance at redemption in the eyes of most of humanity.

Hell, who knows, maybe that's why he was kicked out of his church. Maybe he had a nice one-on-one with the Big Guy and realized he was so, so very wrong. Maybe God looked right at him and told him simply, I don't hate anyone, but you broke my heart.

I doubt it, but still.

Whether he dies now or whether he dies a year from now, I would hope there aren't massive throngs of people gathering to celebrate.

What I really hope are that thousands of gay men and women gather together in a massive ring around the site of his funeral, where they will pray for his lost, misguided, angry soul.

It would be the right thing to do.

And it would piss him off so very, very much.

No, I won't rejoice; I won't be happy. But that would be a just sendoff, methinks.

Saturday

Funny enough, my head feels cold. I didn't expect that, given that I have very short hair anyway, but after getting it shaved off...yep, walking around the mall, it was cold.

I got there about 10 minutes before 12, when everything was scheduled to start, and there were already a lot of people there. Enough that I had a hard time finding DKM in the crowd, even though she was wearing a blinding neon green shirt.

Overall there were 314 people registered for the event...and only 80 women. *Lots* of kids, though, and a surprising number of younger girls, getting shoulder length and longer hair shaved off.

Those are the ones I give major respect to. It takes a lot for a little girl to go bald, especially those who are around junior high age, when how you look is *everything.*

And something that surprised me...I was a little nervous.

I didn't have to wait too long, though; there were about 10 individual shavees ahead of me, and they took the Supercuts team up first.

After about 10 minutes, I was waiting to be the next one out onto the stage.

Yep, a little nervous.

The purple hair did attract attention.

This is KCRA (Sacramento channel 3, NBC) Chris Riva talking to me, and after getting my name and where I was from, the first thing he asked, "Why the purple."

Oh yeah, I threw you all under the bus and told him I have strange friends who donate money to see me do stupid things.

Will I do it again?

Ask me again in a couple of weeks, when I've had to deal with staring and questions...

Wednesday

It started with a picture I'd seen while wandering around Old Sacramento after getting my memorial tattoo; I was waiting for the Spouse Thingy to come pick me up and he was stuck in traffic, so I shopped. And while I shopped I stumbled into an art gallery, where I immediately wanted this cat picture.

It was just before Christmas, and I wasn't buying anything for myself. I made note of it, though, and when we were both back in Old Sac while I made the appointment for my Grumpy & Thumper tattoo, I decided I would get that picture if it was still there.

And it was.

So while I waited for someone who could get it off the wall, the Spouse Thingy wandered around and found some unique pieces made from wood: a hand crafted table, a rocking chair, and a pair of beautiful candlesticks. He asked the woman there if those had been turned on a lathe and she said no, they were hand made, and the conversation about working with a lathe began.

She was politely interested when he mentioned making wood and acrylic pens and selling them on Etsy; she was less polite and far more interested when he was able to show her pictures; those were wonderful, she told him, perhaps he could consider submitting some of his work for consideration.

A couple of weeks later, after thinking about it for a bit, he took a few of his pens up to show her; not as a submission, but to see if she really thought it would be worth the time and effort to submit to their jury. While he was in the gallery, I was walking around outside, and as I passed the gallery (many times, it doesn't take long to walk around Old Sac) there was a guy out front on his phone, excitedly telling someone else "he works in acrylics, and what he has here is really good."

I was fairly sure it was the Spouse Thingy he was talking about, but it wasn't until I walked past again (hey, I got to the end of the building and turned around, because I needed to know) that I was sure: he was talking to someone in charge, and he was incredibly enthused about what he had seen

(Turns out that this guy was the woodworker, the one with the hand crafted table and rocking chair...and his stuff is amazing. If we didn't have cats, we would have that table.)

After seeing his samples, they both assured him that his pens and letter openers and bottle stoppers were not only worth submitting, but he had their vote. Consider it an official invitation to submit to the jury.

So last week, when the jury met, he submitted several pieces for consideration so they could get a clear idea what he does and what he would display. And he resigned himself to waiting to hear the results; just because they were meeting that evening, that doesn't mean their decision would be announced.

But...

As soon as the jury was done, someone called: not only did he get in, it was unanimous. And he was being offered a display spot now, which was never a given. He knew from talking to other artists that he might be accepted, but it might be 2 or 4 or 6 months before he would be given actual space.

Basically, as soon as he could, they wanted him to start displaying.

So today he took a good selection of his pens, a few clocks, corkscrews, keychains, and some bottle stoppers up, and set up his display.

If you're in the area, you can see his display at the Artists' Collaborative Gallery in Old Sacramento. Everything is for sale...and there are some really beautiful things in the gallery.

I'm pretty sure I have dye stains on my scalp, so hopefully those will wear off before then; if not, y'all have something to mock me for.

But the big thing?

I think I need to worry more about actually going bald, not just getting my head shaved and being bald for a couple weeks.

After the St. Baldrick's event, well weeks after, the Spouse Thingyand I are participating in the MS Walk in Solano County. He finally has a Saturday off on the 26th of April, and we're getting our asterisks up early and going to Suisun to walk and hopefully get a shiny medal.

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Places To Go

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Doctor Who Quotes

There's something that doesn't make sense. Let's go and poke it with a stick.

We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?

Every time you see them happy, you remember how sad they're going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later? And the answer is, of course, because they're going to be sad later.

The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.

Do you know, in nine hundred years of time and space I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.

If it’s time to go, remember what you’re leaving. Remember the best. My friends have always been the best of me.